Juve players on the pitch rushed to confront Lukaku. They may or may not have heard the racist abuse — some of them are people of color who have experienced racist abuse themselves — but they saw his goal celebration and the way it wound up their fans.
Referee Davide Massa applied the letter of the law. Or, rather, the updated protocol that applies to referees in Italy and calls for a booking if, after a goal (even a disallowed goal) a player reacts in a way that could represent a danger to the crowd (by, say, climbing the fence to celebrate) or removes his shirt or gestures to the crowd in a way intended to provoke them. To him, Lukaku’s goal celebration fell in the latter category. And so, he showed the player a yellow card, which, because he’d already been booked, meant he got sent off.
Some 10 days earlier, Lukaku had wheeled out the exact same celebration after scoring for Belgium against Sweden. Nobody saw it as a provocation then.
Did Massa realize Lukaku had been racially abused? If he did, according to the protocol, he should have temporarily suspended the game. Just as he should have temporarily suspended the game if Lukaku had told him he had been racially abused. But, of course, communication post-penalty was rather difficult given the fact there was a full-fledged melee involving both sets of players.
Juventus’ statement is meaningful, too, and offers a glimmer of encouragement, at least at club level in that they acknowledged there was “racist abuse” even when it wasn’t audible to the majority of the stadium and well before the videos surfaced. They didn’t say “they were collaborating to establish the facts.” They didn’t say “we’ll help the inquiry but Lukaku needs to stop provoking our supporters.” They owned the moment which, in the world of Serie A, is a big step forward.
